When trying to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time, digital marketing can help a lot with the latter two elements.

But how can you be sure you’re sending the right message for that person, at that time?

Behavioral marketing can help

Briefly, behavioral marketing involves looking at your customer’s, or potential customer’s, previous behavior in order to make sure you send the right message at that moment.

And our new report published in association with IBM, Leveraging Customer Behaviors for Optimal Engagement, investigates why behavioral marketing is so important, how to plan behavioral marketing campaigns, and what it takes to get started.

It also talks about where behavioral marketing is heading as well as providing case studies from brands in South East Asia who are using behavioral marketing today.

In this post, we will summarise three of the case studies in the report which come from GE Capital, Intel, and Volkswagen.

Case Study 1 – GE Capital: Beat the Banks

The marketing challenge

The world of financial products is crowded and it is difficult for consumers to differentiate providers – even with all of the information that is now available.

The behavioral approach

To try and gain market share GE capital launched a site – Art of Money. It’s a prospecting and lead nurturing platform for GE Consumer Finance products.

Through a rich array of lifestyle content, it targeted credit card and personal loan prospects during their path to purchase.

But unlike many other financial sites, this site records content consumption and user engagement and then, in real time, provides the most appropriate product recommendation.

The results

The site attracts approximately 40,000 monthly engagements of which 25% are repeat visitors. Also, retargeted prospects were up to ten times more likely to start the application process compared to other acquisition sources.

Intel

The challenge

Intel wanted to persuade IT decision makers to choose Intel even though it knew that the customer decision process is complicated and long.

Additionally, Intel knew that customer searches varied significantly over time, so it needed to track how an individual customer’s purchase intent changed.

The behavioral approach

Intel built an innovative campaign to influence IT decision makers at every point of the journey. It collected contextual cookie level data, dynamic advertising data, onsite data and third-party research data.

Then, using various metrics, it developed a real-time data analytics strategy to optimize campaigns.

Intel designed over 100 articles to correspond with specific points of the consideration cycle. It then optimized ads according to performance and engagement and served the best-matched content for where the target was in the buying cycle through the most appropriate digital channels.

Results

This campaign achieved six times higher engagement rate for its retargeting campaign compared to Google Display Network’s average. The retargeted visitors showed a 1.9 times higher engagement than the industry average.

Cost per action dropped by 48% when compared with the previous campaign and was nine times lower than the industry average.

Volkswagen

The challenge

In the dynamic digital ecosystem, the consumers’ purchase journey is complex and hard to trace. Volkswagen China wanted to understand consumers’ aspirations and identify those who might be the next customers.

The behavioral approach

Volkswagen developed an advanced analytics to model with different consumer personas. It analyzed recent behavior in social, website and mobile and looked at their response history to emails in order to score their potential as a lead.

With this information, Volkswagen segmented its customer list into consumers who were ready to be contacted by sales, who needed more nurturing and who just wanted brand information.

VW was then able to deliver the messaging which corresponded to the correct time in the customer buying cycle.

Results

The prospect and lead conversation rate increased over 50% with accompanying ROI increase and improved media efficiency

For more on behavioral marketing in APAC, download our new report: Leveraging Customer Behaviors for Optimal Engagement.